Fourth Down

It slipped by me in theaters earlier this year, but now that it has arrived on DVD, I had to give Scream 4 a shot. I thought the original was a really solid film (surprisingly so, perhaps), and while the sequels were examples of diminishing returns, they didn't slip so far that I wasn't willing to see what one more swing at the pinata might produce.

Perhaps a decade is too long a wait, compared to the handful of years separating the original trilogy. Too much time to expect too much. In any case, I found Scream 4 to be a disappointment.

There were still some clever elements to the script. A lot has happened since the last Scream was made, and the movie did advance with the times. Phones played a very important role in the franchise from the beginning, and the film advances with the times to incorporate the ubiquity of cell phones. The franchise has also always been very self-aware, tweaking horror cliches to good effect. It now tackles the new cliches -- "torture porn," remakes, inexplicable plot twists just for the sake of surprise -- and also gets good mileage out of these ideas.

And yet the movie is also too much an homage to its own roots to be truly entertaining. All the big moments are echoes of the same moments from the original film. For a while, this is a good gag when the film itself comments on this, but soon the gag wears thin. And the greater sin is that the entire movie becomes quite predictable. Knowing the end of the first film makes it virtually impossible to not guess the end of this film.

The dialogue isn't quite as snappy, the characters aren't quite as entertaining... it's all the pieces of Scream, but simply brought out of storage and put back into use. Nothing about it feels like it was polished to look nice for the occasion. I'd rate it a C. There are far worse horror movies out there, and a horror fan certainly isn't going to hate this one. But it doesn't really get the blood racing either, which is the real mark of a good film in this genre.